MONTROSE COUNTY — In June — right at the start of the growing season — Eli Feldman and his team stopped watering forage grasses meant to fill thousands of cows’ bellies … on purpose. In July, they did it again.
The reward was worth the lost crops, they said.
Feldman’s team in Montrose County was one of dozens of farmers, ranchers and other water users across four states who got paid to cut their water use this year as part of a multistate drought relief effort in the Colorado River Basin. This year’s cuts totalled about 63,600 acre-feet, or 1% of the four states’ typical water use each year.
For Feldman, the program is an enormous potential revenue stream for farmers and a way to test out ways to conserve water with less financial risk.
“We think it’s going to work well for us. We think that we’re going to get paid an equal or greater amount of money than the value of the lost forage,” said Feldman, president of Conscience Bay Company, a Boulder-based real estate firm that owns cropland on the Western Slope and runs one of the biggest cattle operations in the state.
In 2021 and 2022, the Colorado River’s main reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell, were so low that federal water officials made the basin’s first shortage declaration. The overstretched river basin helps supply water for about 40 million people across the West, including communities across Colorado.
In response, the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — relaunched the System Conservation Pilot Program, which pays volunteers to test out ways to cut back on their water use. Most of the participants have been farmers and ranchers.
This year, the federal program paid about $28.6 million in taxpayer dollars to 110 participants across four states to cut their use by 63,631 acre-feet.
One acre-foot roughly equals the annual use of two to three households. On average, the Upper Basin used about 4.6 million acre-feet of water per year from 2016 to 2020.
In total, the program has paid people across all four states about $53.1 million to shrink water usage by about 148,700 acre-feet between 2015 and 2024.
System conservation in Colorado
In Colorado, the federal conservation program paid 46 participants $7,204,730 to cut water use by 14,239 acre-feet this year.
People can choose how they want to cut their water use and the amount of land they want to involve in the program. This year, Colorado farmers and ranchers mostly chose to fallow all or some of their land. Some tested out crops that are better able to withstand drought conditions. In return, they received $509 for each acre-foot of water conserved.
In Montrose County, Ryan Whitfield fallowed nearly 800 acres into the program in exchange for about $705,000. He did not know his total water savings as of Tuesday. He planned to use the money to pay water bills, taxes and labor costs so he didn’t have to lay anyone off.
“You have to have gambling blood,” Whitfield said. If you apply and plan as though you were approved — and then you weren’t — then you’d lose, he said.
“I hope they have another one,” he said. “I’d love to do it again.”
In total, Conscience Bay Company enrolled about 800 acres spanning 16 fields across the Gunnison River Basin. Normally, the fields grow a mixture of legumes and grasses for cattle grazing as part of a much larger operation: When fully stocked, Conscience Bay has up to 2,800 cattle grazing 3,000 acres of irrigated land or about 200,000 acres of federal land in the high country, depending on the season.
This year, the Conscience Bay team decided to stop irrigating for part of the season in order to cut their water use by about 547 acre-feet in exchange for about $278,000. Those funds helped offset the lost revenue from fallowing crops.
The group aims to figure out how to maximize both growing forage and conserving water, and they are studying the longer term impacts of fallowing land. A metal instrument on a fence, called a LI-710 Evapotranspiration Sensor, counts the water molecules as they evaporate off the field. The device will help quantify the plants’ consumptive use more precisely.
Sharing the findings will help answer questions for other farmers and ranchers, the team said.
“People are scared of what they don’t know. You stop watering grass. Well, OK, how much yield are we going to lose this year? If we stress the plants, what’s it going to do next year?” Feldman said.
The 14,000 acre-feet of water that does not get used up on the farmers’ fields keeps flowing downstream. The idea is that more water in the rivers and streams can help mitigate some of the environmental impacts of the two-decade megadrought in the basin, according to state spokesperson Michael Sakas.
“The water conserved in this program may help mitigate drought at a local level, and also helps water users develop tools to adapt to long-term drought,” said Sakas of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources.
When water flows downstream in Colorado, it can still be used by other farmers, ranchers and communities. It is not directed to a specific reservoir where it can be saved for an even drier day, Feldman said.
“We conserve water. It’s in the system for anybody else to divert. It’s hard to say what public benefit that really provides. It doesn’t really put us in a position where we’re any more protected next year,” Feldman said.
Participants from industries, cities and towns make up a small slice of the program. This year, there were two urban or industrial projects in other states.
In Colorado, the Bureau of Reclamation rejected the sole municipal application, which was from Pueblo Water Works south of Colorado Springs, according to the Upper Colorado River Commission.
The bureau did not agree to the water utility’s asking price, so Pueblo did not participate, wrote Joe Cervi, spokesperson for the utility, in an email to The Colorado Sun.
The original compensation was $479,987 for cutting water use by 943 acre-feet, according to state records.
“We will certainly look at applying in the future. Again, whether our bid is accepted is not up to us,” he said.
The future is entirely unclear
The conservation pilot program is set to end this year. U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper, a Colorado Democrat, introduced a bill to reauthorize it through 2026. The bill successfully passed out of committee; however, it has weeks to move through the Senate and House before this Congress ends in early January.
If the bill does not pass, or no decision is made, it would have to be reintroduced in the next Congress for the program to be reauthorized.
The program’s funding comes from federal dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ landmark climate change and health care bill under the Biden administration. President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to rescind unspent money allocated by the law, according to news reports.
Getting applicants won’t be an issue for a future version of the program: This year’s effort was such a positive experience among participants that more people are already asking about joining, said Greg Vlaming, who runs Rocking V Soil and Water Conservation and helped guide nine farmers through the program’s application process this year.
Timing might be an issue. In 2023, complicated contracts and a short application window between December and March were concerns for potential applicants.
Farmers will need to start buying seed, fertilizer and preparing crop-specific machinery in early winter and will have to have their operations going by March and April, Vlaming said. But, those issues seem to have been resolved.
“I know my guys who signed up in 2024 would want to sign up again,” Vlaming said. “It’s a lucrative program.”